


Road Trippin’

by bopscotch



Category: Fallen Hero Series - Malin Rydén
Genre: Fallen Hero spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-13
Updated: 2020-12-13
Packaged: 2021-03-11 02:34:32
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,183
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28037760
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bopscotch/pseuds/bopscotch
Summary: A little jaunt outside for the first time. Time to walk on new legs.
Kudos: 5





	Road Trippin’

**Author's Note:**

> extremely short post-first escape sidestep. part of something bigger i will probably never finish. i dont write or read a lot of fanfic so i have no idea how to tag this i’m so sorry if anyone has advice i welcome it.

You stumble along a desert road. Your body feels like it’s been scraped raw. Out. That’s what you are now. You’ve never really been something new like this before. Headlights finally crest over the horizon, you ready yourself. Hopefully it’s not moving too fast. Intent pours out of you in a steady stream, falling over the driver like a shower. He rolls to a gentle stop in front of you, stepping out to hand you the keys before you nudge him to head west. He’ll find a gas station there in about a mile, where he’ll recount being carjacked by a group of masked men, how frightening it was. If he’s lucky, the cops will find his car in a few days, in a parking lot not far from a bus station, and all he will have taken from all of this will be his tale of a night of bland desert survival. You’re doing him a favour. Human life is just a series of punctuated events. You’ve given his day substance, now it won’t just melt away.

* * *

You throw yourself down on the quilted bedcover. It smells of ash and mold. In the next room, a fight. Angry thoughts covering you, a dissonant echo with their real voices breaking through the thin plaster. Sex in the room one over from that, they know each other but they aren’t having fun. The woman behind the desk didn’t sleep last night, a new baby that she’s anxious to be away from. People milling about in the parking lot, teenagers experimenting with being cruel to each other in small ways, three of them have hurt feelings but all of them are laughing, throwing empty cans. You’re shaking. Everything in you now is adrenaline but there’s nowhere to go. You went as far you could today, your body has limits and you are well past them. Will it be enough? Will you close your eyes to miss them breaking in the door? You decide not to sleep. You can stay awake for a long time if you stay very still, even though it leaves you treading water. The heads get thicker, soupy. You’re left tunneling your way through endless noise. It will be worth it. If they catch you, you’re not going to let it be a surprise. On fieldwork trips you would refuse to sleep, pretending if need be. They would drop you in the city and you would flood with colour. Everything in the Farm was without flavour, the un-Numbered scientists familiar and bland, mostly drowned out by the sucking miasma of Re-Gene heads all around you. Too much synchronicity there. Out in the world, in populated places, there was so much to touch. You could sit inside it and learn things. New information, new tastes, new ideas. You wouldn’t turn yourself off for a second of that. You had never been rebellious, but you were built to learn and to execute, and you would do what you were built to do. You wonder if they would agree with that assessment now. 

The ceiling here is a jagged stucco, you want to touch it. It occurs to you that you can. That you are a being capable of both whim and action. You stand on the bed and drag your palms across the stubble, figure eights. Bits of plaster dust dislodge as your hands erode the surface. Your skin is red and irritated and buzzing when you pull them back to you. You stare at them for a little while and then you put the TV on. It’s a sitcom, you think. You don’t like video, all those people moving around and living in the quiet. 2D in every sense. You can’t feel them but they’re there but they’re not. You imagine that the thoughts bleeding down the walls from the rooms around you belong to characters on the screen. Would they appreciate being made whole? Or would they just resent you. Canned laughter rings out from the set, shrill and crackling. You smile broadly, like you know to do to the sound of laughing. You appreciate the prerecorded chorus, invisible spectators whose only role is reaction. Who serve only to give you cues you would otherwise have to look for. Life should have a laugh track, cue cards that tell you when to smile or cry or look away. You don’t understand why people seem to want eye contact when they speak to you. It’s so much more work, having to maintain that connection while you try to put words together. Why insist on splitting the focus? So much left to learn.

The couple next door settles down, but the air around you still flickers with their resentments. You watch commercials for products you don’t see the point of yet. You want to understand. When they end, you choose to flip through channels until you find more ad breaks. They’re bright and colourful and they tell you what to want. That eats up about an hour. The teenagers move on, people around you go to sleep. You let their dreams into you, conflicting and busy and vague. Places that don’t exist, feathered at the edges. You stop changing channels when you pass through a nature show, a flock of birds taking flight. Animals are a bit of a fascination to you. They taught you so much about people, but no one has ever needed you to impress a creature, so why bother knowing? You used to listen to voices outside the facility, things you could tell weren’t human but couldn’t see to identify. Little things that crawled on the ground and hid in warrens, thinking desperately of food and safety. Something bigger that only showed up occasionally, moving like a predator, nose to the ground, lighting up with smells, crystal clear information in a new form. Now, you listen to the pigeons in the motel parking lot outside, letting their chattering anxieties overlay with the birds on the screen.

* * *

You know where you want to end up, but you head in the opposite direction. You can’t help but leave a trace. At a gas station, you buy a road map and a lollipop. The teenager behind the counter makes some idle small talk with bored eyes, you laugh brightly as they hand you a 50$ bill with your change. The lollipop says it tastes of strawberry, but you wouldn’t really know. It tastes like pink to you. You’ll hit the city soon, which makes you a little nervous because you don’t know how to drive. You’ve been peeling instructions out of everyone you pass, recreating the way they feel behind the wheel. The way they hold their arms, how hard they press their right foot down. Out here in the desert, it’s not hard, all sprawling straight lines. Real city streets will be more complicated, and getting caught because you totalled a car would make this all fairly pointless. You drop the map into the glove compartment, next to the bible you stole from the motel. You’ve got a long journey ahead of you.

* * *

The bus floor is sticky in a way that doesn’t seem to make sense. You flip through a magazine filled with bright, blocky graphic design and flash photographs of people who don’t seem to appreciate being there. You try to figure out why you’re meant to care about them. Almost all of them are blonde. The person on the cover beams out at the world beyond the page, puffed up and proud. Some hero that saved some city for some reason. Look at how they’re loved, how even the people on this dank, depressing bus feel some measure of respect when their eyes pass over the image. You drape the magazine over your face, wearing them like a mask. You can close your eyes, just for a minute. 

You wake up when someone sits next to you, alert to every touch. You gently convince them that there’s a smell at the back of the bus. Their face wrinkles a little as they move seats. This back corner is your domain now. Four more hours, if the bus driver’s watch is accurate. You can’t imagine it wouldn’t be. The sun is a flat circle, illuminating the forehead grease on the window from every other passenger who has ever leaned their head against this glass. Forensic evidence of arbitrary habit. You let your cheek against it, it’s colder than you expected. Everyone on this bus thinks you look normal, enough to barely remark upon you, even without your persuasion. You’re a passenger, just like all of them. It’s a comfort to be a part of this shared noun. Carried together. A sign rushes past. Welcome to Idaho. How friendly.

* * *

You’re on a circular little journey, leaving as broad and oblong a trail as you can. If they are following you, you’re going to make them work for it.

In Idaho, you buy lipstick and a hair bleaching kit in a drugstore, carefully rearranging your face in a hotel bathroom. Your reflection looks ghoulish, your hair streaked and greyed out with thick, white paste. The lipstick is too red. You run through a series of expressions, focusing on the transitions, careful to switch feeling gradually enough without being too slow. People are volatile but have to have consistency. This is going to be a truer test of your training than any job. When you wash the bleach out, you don’t look anything like the woman on the box. 

In Wyoming, you have your first ever conversation. A man outside a corner store drinking from a bottle in a bag. It goes well, you think. You tell him about the birds from the nature show, how they’re only pink because of what they eat. You make a little joke about it. Nothing in your whole life compares to the feeling of success when it works. How exciting to do something right without script or agenda. He seems to like you, offers you a cigarette, like a treat for a trick well-performed. You buy him a candy bar when you go into the store, in the interest of reciprocity, determined to do the done thing. That, plus the tasteless hotdog, souvenir sweatshirt and bottled water turn out to be more than you have cash for. This place has cameras, so you settle for having the cashier undercharge you, rather than gaining anything from the exchange. Best not to push it so soon. 

In Utah, you wake up in the back pew of a small church on a Sunday morning, groups of people filtering in for the service. You decide to stay, even though crowds make your teeth hurt. It turns out to be intoxicating, the joint swells of emotion, a room full of people all set in motion together, rising and falling along the same track. You mimic the actions of the people around you, working hard not to stick out. It feels good to be one among the many, letting everything they are fill you up. When they sing, you open and close your mouth like you’re a part of it. All these voices together makes everything viscous, so unified it floats as a whole above the thought strata, oil on water. 

In Colorado, you sit on the roof of the car you slept in to watch the sun come up over the mountains. If you can keep this up, this won’t be just some brief little foray. You could stay out here. You hadn’t really considered the future, just that you needed to get out, even if only for one brief, shining moment. Just to see something, take something on your own. The air feels wet, your knuckles are red. You bury them in your jacket pockets, your favourite piece of stolen laundry so far. It’s grey and warm and has patches on the arms that make it feel like it carries memories. Proof of life. You light a cigarette and think of the man from Wyoming, who was so happy to share a spare moment with you. There’s a bottle cap in your pocket that you nicked from his. 

In Arizona, you borrow someone’s van for the day and drive to the Grand Canyon, because it seems to mean something. Driving feels good now, comfortable. You like how it feels, the logic of it. The way your body is starting to know how to do it all by itself, and you can just watch the endless tableau splashed across the windshield, watching bugs die as they collide with you. You roll the windows down and let your arm hang out, the sun cooking you to the bone. The desert feels familiar, the sounds and senses the same as the Farm, without the noxious buzz of human and almost-human thought alike. What a difference it makes. 

You had thought that being Out would let you leave the Farm behind, but your mind still spends all its time there. There is nothing you have learned, nothing of you, that did not come from there. You cannot think in a way that is isolated from it, it runs through you like a nervous system. Maybe if you touch enough, see enough, you will be able to stop referring back to it. Maybe you can loosen the grip its understanding has on you. Shed its logic. 

You pass by the bones of an old town, maybe a one-time tourist destination, now desiccated and beige. How many decades since anyone could live out here? There must be hundreds of places like this that you’ve never seen. Remnants of all that was out there before so much crumbled. You pull over and walk in, the sun at your back. Old streets now just dirt, cracking under the sun. Some of this town was built to look older than it is, done up like a Wild West ghost town in a prophetic little gimmick. They look so correct now. The 7/11s and grocery stores look far worse, even though they were probably built sturdier. At least the fake buildings knew what story they were in. 

You walk until you can’t see the car anymore, and then you lay on the ground, arms wide, even though it’s searingly hot to the touch. How many months have you been out here? How long until you can stop running without feeling terrified? This is the first time you’ve begun a day knowing you would sleep in the same town you woke up in. Maybe they’re not even following you. Maybe you just keep moving so you don’t have to think. Are you really clever enough to outsmart them? Maybe they’re just waiting until you fuck this up. It’s going to happen one day, they must know it, just like you do. Who knows you better than them? Why would they build you smarter than themselves? One day Regina will have you back. How much time can you eke out in between? 

You close your eyes. No darkness, just the bright, awful orange of your own eyelids. You cast yourself out, as far as you can extend it, sweeping the desert like a fishing trawler. Let it catch everything, let them come to you. 

It starts in a tiny stream, more of a dribble. Small brown lizards coming from down the building walls, rats emerging from hidden places. More and more as it builds, as you pull everything in as far a radius as you are able towards you, a whirlpool swirl of creatures coming to crawl over your body. A rattlesnake that oozes over your outstretched arms, the dry tension of its clenching muscles. A woodpecker perched on your knee, shuffling sideways. You lift a scorpion in your hand, letting it skitter over and around your fingers. You want more. You want to drown in them. A lumbering gila monster comes around the corner, heavy belly dragging on the ground, pouring itself over your chest, pushing you down into the dirt. A quail that sprints nervously around your head, to and fro, back and forth. You let them all over you, let them subsume you. Bury yourself in the muscle and bone of simpler things. Let their feelings flurry together inside you. Some little pig comes to you, dogged at the ankles by even smaller piglets. You feel how she frets for them. You are making sure that no one creature poses a threat to another, that they all see each other as neither prey nor threat, at least for now. But even so, she worries. Noses at them, soft snuffling, just checking in. Pressed in on all sides, all these beings crushing into you. You cry for the first time in your entire life, into the body of a snake that has wrapped itself over your eyes. 

It’s almost dusk when you reach the canyon itself. You sit on the edge of the cliff and light a cigarette, your first habit, the ash disintegrates into the chasm. The dwindling sun is bouncing off the Colorado river, making it flat and silver, slick and lifeless metal inlaid on the earth. You thought it would all look more alive. Mostly it just seems still. And enormous. For a second, you think about throwing yourself forwards. Just for a second. It would be cinematic. Maybe you should live out here, alone in the desert with all the reptiles and birds, never have to brush against a human mind ever again. You dismiss the thought. You can’t be one of them, you can’t even pretend, and you are absolutely nothing without a reference.

You cross California in a fevered rush, so close now to stopping. To settling. You don’t stop even once, the last leg of your journey stretching well past the realm of the tolerable. Not until you hit the coast. It’s the middle of the night, the moon is out above the water, taking up too much of the sky tonight. You drop your jacket and your bag in the sand and wade in without a second’s pause. It’s freezing, the cold skips your flesh and hits you straight in the bones. The water runs through and against you, your clothes stick and flow in equal measure, dragging behind you. Everything is pulling you back. You keep going until you’re on your tiptoes, the water lapping against your lower lip, even with your head tipped all the way back. Then you turn. Back on the shore, you can see the cityscape. Smaller now than before it was rebuilt, certainly, but still a vast mess of electric lights and spindly office towers, stark black against the indecisively coloured sky, smog and darkness and stars fighting for supremacy. The salt stings the back of your throat as you accidentally inhale the sea. This is yours now. This is your baptism. This is where you’ll disappear. This is finally a place big enough to consume you. You shift your weight and your body drifts up, floating on the surface like a bit of litter.


End file.
